[HN Gopher] HTTP Cats
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HTTP Cats
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 549 points
Date : 2026-01-30 13:56 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (http.cat)
(TXT) w3m dump (http.cat)
| potatosalad99 wrote:
| I love how there is a Catalan version too! I guess it's probably
| a requirement for getting the .cat domain.
| hbn wrote:
| Does look to be the case.
|
| nyan.cat has a language picker that includes Catalan, even
| though it just changes the page title.
| maxbond wrote:
| Imho it's pretty messed up that their translation tool
| doesn't actually translate the page and only translates one
| element. For the most part the site is a lark and the text
| unimportant. But the banner disclaiming any affiliation with
| any meme coin really ought to be translated.
| maxbond wrote:
| https://icannwiki.org/.cat
|
| > Administered by the non-profit Fundacio puntCAT under the
| oversight of ICANN, registrations are available only to
| individuals and organizations demonstrating use or promotion of
| the Catalan language and culture.
| mycall wrote:
| Is that available for every country root server?
| maxbond wrote:
| As far as I can tell, there is no rule requiring this wiki
| to be kept up to date (it's not run by ICANN, though they
| sponsor it), but I've had good luck with it. The wiki is
| updated fairly frequently:
| https://icannwiki.org/Special:RecentChanges . I wasn't able
| to find a list that proves it covers every TLD but there
| are about 9x as many articles as TLDs, so I think it's
| likely. Someone with better MediaWiki chops could probably
| figure it out. I think that information is there I just
| don't know how to access it.
|
| ETA: This category lists 314 ccTLDs.
|
| https://icannwiki.org/Category:CcTLD
|
| There are 316 ccTLDs. So; it's either missing 2, or they
| are documented but not in the right category.
|
| If you're looking for an authoritative source I think you
| should check out the PSL, but it doesn't have the right
| metadata to answer your question. You'd need to supplement
| it somehow.
|
| https://publicsuffix.org/
| null0ranje wrote:
| https://http.cat/ca
| paufernandez wrote:
| The funny thing is that upon registration of a .cat domain you
| are required to acknowledge that your website is not related to
| cats at all. So those domains are, in theory, not in
| compliance.
| lmz wrote:
| But what if it's a Catalan cat charity?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| They don't ask you to "acknowledge that your website is not
| related to cats at all", they're asking you to confirm that
| the website "serve(s) the needs of the Catalan Linguistic and
| Cultural Community on the Internet" by entering what the
| intended use is. Signed, owner of emsh.cat.
|
| One could say by having the websites become popular and
| viral, and offering versions of the their websites in
| Catalan, they are spreading Catalan culture to more parts of
| the internet. We're having a discussiong about it right now,
| others are reading, pretty big impact from just the TLD
| choice :)
| Biganon wrote:
| I used to own long.cat and I never bothered
| taherm789 wrote:
| Love http and love cats
| rireads wrote:
| Real
| superkuh wrote:
| HTTP 000: HTTP not found. HTTPS CA TLS only.
|
| That said, at least they have a broad cipher set support and
| their HTTPS-only implemetation does work in older browsers and
| systems. That's nice. But HTTP+HTTPS would be better.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| Previous discussions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37735614 (2023)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31438989 (2022)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20283794 (2019)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161323 (2015)
| carlos-menezes wrote:
| There's an alternative[0] for the canine lovers.
|
| [0]: https://httpstatusdogs.com
| cpendery wrote:
| Or the shorter https://http.dog
| t1234s wrote:
| Do any browsers recognize a 420 response code?
| graypegg wrote:
| Your browser (if you're using one of the "usual ones") doesn't
| really do much with the response's status code if it doesn't
| match a few specific ones for redirecting/caching/protocol
| shenanigans.
|
| Anything in the 4XX range is going to be treated as just a
| regular ol' response, just like 404. (You could serve an entire
| site with all responses set to status=404, and be fine... other
| than probably never getting any cache hits) If you don't
| include a body in the response, the browser might sub in it's
| own error page, but it will just communicate that the user
| agent made a bad request.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Once upon a time, Internet Explorer used to substitute its
| own error pages if the body of the error response was too
| short for its liking. Those depended on whcih error code it
| got. (I expect nobody has used an old enough IE to see those
| pages for at least a decade.)
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I've seen sites that use unexpected HTTP response codes, I
| think to try to defeat bots. The front page would return a
| 503 Service Unavailable, but the body was just normal content
| that would load a bot detection script and then redirect you
| to the actual content.
|
| I successfully wrote a bot that would bypass it all, but it
| was weird, and became a slight challenge since I couldn't
| rely on response codes to determine if I succeeded. When I
| solved the challenge, it would return a 400 Bad Request while
| serving me the content I was looking for.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 204 has weird behavior in Safari and Firefox for example.
| Entering a URL returning 204 in the URL bar will _not_ change
| the URL bar to it, leaving its contents to whatever was there
| before. Similarly if you click on it it would not actually
| navigate to the page.
|
| URL to test: https://httpbin.org/status/204
| falcor84 wrote:
| Not to be confused with Cat as a Service - https://cataas.com/
| rogeriopvl wrote:
| This is a great idea. Love it!
| cat-whisperer wrote:
| this is exactly what I was looking for!
| ulrischa wrote:
| Wo makes this with babies?
| nkrisc wrote:
| Is the picture for 303 meant to be the device from Heisenberg's
| thought experiment?
| meken wrote:
| I was wondering the same thing.
| shmeeed wrote:
| Obviously
| npodbielski wrote:
| 450 gave me good chuckle
| montroser wrote:
| Nginx makin' up status codes...
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| This is fun because it's pre-AI and most of the pics are real.
| Doing this nowadays would be a meh.
| mattcantstop wrote:
| 404 should have been the cat footprints in the concrete but
| without the cat.
| spockz wrote:
| Actually, that would be "401 Gone". :-)
| roblh wrote:
| I unironically use this website everytime I forget a status code
| at work. The name is instantly memorable, it loads immediately,
| and I can ctrl-f it. It's basically muscle memory at this point.
| snailmailman wrote:
| Same. I know and see several of the codes all the time. But
| occasionally I encounter a weird one and I always go to
| http.cat to find out what it is.
| lazystar wrote:
| i still don't understand 409 errors. saw one for the first
| time a few weeks ago
| hvb2 wrote:
| Key violation in your database? Can't insert the record
| because the key already exists? Thus conflict
| CleverUSB wrote:
| Ahaha same.
| precommunicator wrote:
| I always post a cat from it whenever I need to specify a
| response code in an issue ;)
| silverwind wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes is a
| bit more practical
| flexagoon wrote:
| Yes, but opening that and searching for "411" is much slower
| than just typing "http.cat/411" into the URL bar
| bayindirh wrote:
| Also relieves a stress a bit with a funny cat photo.
| There's also http.dog to the same effect.
| bennett_dev wrote:
| Same - most of the time I just directly open the specific
| status (e.g https://http.cat/504 )
| tantalor wrote:
| I used similar idea in an app a while back:
|
| https://github.com/tantalor/emend/blob/master/app/static/ima...
|
| Still gives me a chuckle
| agcat wrote:
| This is hilarious
| adocomplete wrote:
| I'm partial to http.dog
| ninju wrote:
| https://http.dog/
| shevy-java wrote:
| Why is the quality of the pictures so low?
| wpm wrote:
| Because this website has been around for a long time and
| pictures didn't used to be so big
| reaperducer wrote:
| Came for 418. Left happy for Caturday.
|
| (Every web site I've built in the last ten years has a series of
| conditions that combined will trigger a 418.)
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| I've used this site every time I'm doing http networking stuff
| for the past few years. It's so easy to just go to http.cat/303
| to check a status code you don't know, or to scroll down the
| homepage to find the number you need for a specific response.
|
| The cats make it much more fun than a regular docs page, whilst
| still being a useful quick reference. I wonder if other bits of
| reference information could be made more interesting in this way.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| I prefer https://HTTPStatusDogs.com
| ivanstepanovftw wrote:
| There is also https://http.dog/
| fencepost wrote:
| Worth noting that http.dog includes 218 This is Fine, which is
| an Apache-specific response code.
|
| It does not, however, use a cartoon dog in a room on fire.
| opengrass wrote:
| 599 is good for any error.
| shoo wrote:
| https://www.keanu.codes/
| meken wrote:
| Love it.
|
| Only feedback I have is when I click into an image then hit back,
| it brings me to the top of the page which is kind of annoying. I
| wish it held my place.
| rogeriopvl wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. I'm going to fix that.
|
| Issue created: https://github.com/httpcats/http.cat/issues/258
| dionian wrote:
| glad you got the teapot
| mshroyer wrote:
| Illustrating "451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons" with Ray
| Bradbury made me laugh
| shmeeed wrote:
| Thank you for explaining the reference!
| mshroyer wrote:
| I didn't realize, until recognizing Bradbury in that image
| yesterday, that HTTP status 451 is an explicit reference to
| "Fahrenheit 451", but apparently it is: https://www.rfc-
| editor.org/rfc/rfc7725
|
| In the acknowledgments section,
|
| > Thanks also to Ray Bradbury.
| misir wrote:
| I used to have a middleware that replaced generic http error
| responses with http.cat pics. One time a VIP somehow got into a
| URL that returned http 400 response on the website and got mad.
|
| I ended up getting a call to explain why the website is showing
| middle finger to our VIP customer.
| lazystar wrote:
| still, probably better than a 450 error, at least
| mszcz wrote:
| Couple of years ago I worked as a full stack web dev for a
| electronics distributor.
|
| At that time we had a couple of DB problems, it would get
| overwhelmed, shit itself and our page would show an error. I
| found some time and, instead of fixing the error (duh ;P), I
| downloaded around 20-30 funny cat gifs, assigned each a funny
| caption and modified the error page so that each would show
| randomly.
|
| Next time the DB shit itself, the error page showed up and the
| cats wrought refresh chaos upon Apache but it took it in stride
| since the error page was mostly static.
|
| Everyone was delighted but after around 15 minutes I got a call
| from sales asking my to take the cats down. ,,It's not very
| businessy, take it down!". ,,The site is down either way, would
| you rather our clients stare at a dry message or something
| funny?". ,,Dry message! Take it down". ,,No" and I hung up. So
| proud of myself that I stood up to them. I think the cats are
| still up to this day ;)
|
| The point of this story is that http.cat made me think of those
| cat pages, thanks!
| aniforprez wrote:
| I still do this day mourn the old httpstatus.io or whatever it
| was domain that got acquired a few years back and became
| completely useless. This one endures and I love it. This one
| stays bookmarked but at least the MDN page on status codes now
| pops up as the first useful link when you search for "http status
| codes"
| 701mk wrote:
| httpstatus.io is actually a good tool that I've been using for
| over 3 years now so I think it isn't that domain that got
| acquired?
| aniforprez wrote:
| Yeah I did some mild research and the domain I'm thinking of
| was httpstatuses.com which was acquired by WebFX and turned
| useless. jkulton revived it at https://httpstatuses.io/ which
| they document in their blog
| https://jkulton.com/2022/reviving-httpstatuses/
| tonychang430 wrote:
| every once in a while i use this! it's so easy to memorize this
| domain
| lsofzz wrote:
| Haha made my day
| rogeriopvl wrote:
| http.cat author here.
|
| A shout out to Tomomi Imura, because HTTP Status Cats was her
| idea and I just made the images available through an API.
|
| It's crazy to think that since 2010 this still pops up on the HN
| front page from time to time. Thank you for that!
|
| http.cat is a testament of how simple, fun and silly the internet
| was back then. I'll try to keep it online for as long as I can.
|
| I love reading the stories you all share online about it, they
| fuel my motivation to keep it up and I'm always open to feedback
| and new ideas. So feel free to share them here or on the github
| repo.
|
| Cheers!
| ashikns wrote:
| I discovered it today and I'm in love! Thank you for
| maintaining a piece of simple joy for more than a decade <3
| grelek wrote:
| Anytime I need to check an HTTP status code I go to http.cat. I
| get the answer to my question and a cat picture as a bonus.
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| This is what the internet was supposed to be
| geostyx wrote:
| I've used http.cat for years to double check what an http code
| is for. Thank you both for making it!
| tomwphillips wrote:
| Thank you, and please keep it online. Apparently I am incapable
| of remembering HTTP status codes and I always go straight to
| http.cat!
| pandler wrote:
| Thanks for keeping that service up and running! I think it's
| been about 10 years since I found it and it's been my go-to
| reference ever since. I'll often get laughs from people when I
| share it as reference.
| danielodievich wrote:
| It is my favorite http resource. I pull it up during
| troubleshooting conference calls for inevitable lightening of
| mood. +1000 karma to you
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I don't get why this picture for HTTP 497.
| jama211 wrote:
| Now this is what the internet was made for
| sph wrote:
| Also, for the frontend devs out there:
|
| https://placecats.com/
|
| https://placekittens.com/
| tanelpoder wrote:
| Since we are talking cats here, let me plug my CatBench vector
| search playground app, intended to learn and demonstrate in a
| visual way how (PyTorch + ViT) image embeddings and (Postgres)
| vector search work together with your regular OLTP transactional
| data. I implemented a toy version of a purchase recommendation
| system based on "cat customer" image similarity and "cat fraud
| detection" building block too:
|
| https://github.com/tanelpoder/catbench
|
| Also, a simple browser-only page for visually demonstrating what
| embeddings/vectors physically are, for explaining this to
| database & storage folks:
|
| https://tanelpoder.com/catvector/
|
| (Initial load of the vector heatmaps may take a few seconds when
| you click on a pet type)
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| - https://httpgoats.com/
|
| - https://httpcats.com/
|
| - https://http.garden/
|
| - https://httpducks.com/
|
| - https://http.fish/
|
| - https://http.pizza/
|
| - https://httpstatusdogs.com/
|
| I maintain a list of domains, so it was quite easy to find them
|
| - https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
| swordsith wrote:
| love this lol so many images I've never seen before but
| definitely should be peak internet culture.
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(page generated 2026-01-31 23:02 UTC)